Slavery in Africa (African Studies)

Slavery in Africa is a very old institution with diverse origins, forms, and ramifications. It is therefore subject to different perceptions and definitions in different ex-slaving societies in the continent. Forms of servitude like polygyny, tribute payments, and retainership of royal households were practiced in Africa but were not slavery in the strict sense of the word, though they are known to have created enabling conditions for slavery. The history of slavery in the continent shows development from servitude to slavery, but large-scale outright enslavement and sales of captives were by-products of the external slave trades. The trans-Atlantic, trans–Red Sea/Indian Ocean, and trans-Saharan slave trades appear to have been largely responsible for introducing slavery and analogous practices among many African peoples. In this bibliography, slavery is defined as the subjugation of individuals to temporary or permanent involuntary servitude, including using such persons as chattels, as sex slaves, and in rituals. Slavery is not determined by the way an enslaved person is treated but by the fact that the function such a person performs is involuntary. Though slavery in Africa dates back to the periods of ancient Egypt, Roman imperialism in North Africa, and the epoch of ceremonial kingship of ancient empires of Sudan, it became a terrible experience only during the external slave trade. It was in this period that states whose rulers had not yet used retainers and who became involved in slave trade eventually practiced domestic slavery. As a rule, most polities that took part in the slave trade became slave users. The external slave trade is known also to have influenced development in the continent, albeit negatively, even after it fell. For instance, European colonization of Africa is linked to the trans-slave trade in that it weakened the continent so badly that it did not take much effort on the part of European imperialists to colonize it. It also exposed the rich resources of the continent, which the Europeans exploited with impunity through colonization. Recruitment and use of Africans in the exploitation of economic resources in the continent were involuntary; therefore, colonialism was another stage of European perpetration of slavery in Africa. While new forms of slavery are plaguing the continent every day, the legacy of past slave trading and slavery negatively pervades almost all aspects of African development. A good knowledge of sources on slavery in Africa is important in appreciating its role in the underdevelopment saga of this continent.
General Overviews
There are many scholarly works of a general nature on slavery in Africa that portray it as originally a multipurpose institution that was firmly grafted on the sociopolitical organization of many ancient slaving polities in Africa. It was different in comparison with slavery in Western Europe and the Americas where slavers exploited their slaves largely for economic purposes. In Africa, slavery was hardly an economic venture of any importance before the external slave trade began, in which many African collaborators of European slavers took part and benefited. Overviews on the history of slavery in Africa have treated it and its multiple ramifications as part of a general history or anthropology of Africa. Such works generally highlight slavers, the enslaved, and the processes of enslavement among some slaving peoples of Africa. Most early writings on slavery are of this nature. Klein 1993, Meillassoux 1975, and Fomin 2002 treat indigenous slavery practices and their ramifications in Africa; Miers and Kopytoff 1977 shows the transformations of some African societies that took part in varied slavery practices. Curtin 1969, Inikori 1982, Hodgkin 1997, and Thornton 1998 capture the magnitude of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from an African perspective.
Curtin, D. Philip. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
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Curtin’s work is on the population that West and Central Africa lost to North America, especially the United States. Though some historians have accused him of exaggerating the statistics, his work is useful as an overview of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa from a demographic point of view.
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Fomin, E. S. D. A Comparative Study of Societal Influences on Indigenous Slavery in Two Types of Societies in Africa. New York: Edwin Mellen, 2002.
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This work is a comparative overview of how different and varied ethnic peoples of Africa adopted slavery to their cultural values. It compares ethnic polities with centralized political cultures to ethnic polities with noncentralized political cultures in Africa and the ways they organized their slavery institutions.
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Hodgkin, Thomas. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
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This work covers a great span of time and space in Atlantic slave trade history. It draws from valuable primary sources like records of ship captains and port statistics, thus providing a good linkage to specific areas of Africa, although it does not provide details of the events it tackles.
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Inikori, E. Joseph, ed. Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies. New York: Africana, 1982.
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The ten well-researched chapters of this book are focused on the many ramifications of the trans-slave trade on African people in different parts of the continent. It provides good coverage of West Africa and reasonable portions of East Africa. Each chapter provides good reference notes and a bibliography.
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Klein, Martin, ed. Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
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This is a limited but important collection of edited works on slavery in Africa and Asia. The value of the work in the study of slavery in Africa lies in the epistemological conceptualization of slavery, bondage, and emancipation as used in both the African and the Asian systems.
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Meillassoux, Claude, ed. L’esclavage en Afrique précoloniale. Paris: François Maspero, 1975.
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This work studies slavery in Africa from an institutional perspective and shows that slavery promoted new aristocracy in the states of Sudan and some coastal polities in Africa. The capitalist approach used may not be quite as helpful in studying indigenous slavery in Africa, but it opens up many new paradigms.
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Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.
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Contributors to this work give, in various chapters, a survey of slavery in different parts of Africa from a societal perspective. The different background treatment gives a clear picture of the many ways slavery was organized in the continent, its impact on the lives of people, and its linkage with the Atlantic system.
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Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is an ambitious piece of work in terms of the period it covers. It shows in outline form the roles that people of African origin in the continent and in the diasporas in Americas played in making this history, which exacted on their ancestors the greatest inhumanity in history.
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Reference Works
Pure reference works on slavery in Africa are limited. The few that exist are in the form of encyclopedia, dictionaries, and Wikipedia entries on African history, and many of them pay reasonable attention to slavery and analogous practices. Reference works that researchers often use are general works on history and the social sciences and are usually not limited to Africa. The reference works included in this section are of different natures, and some treat subjects other than slavery. Many are not specifically written as reference works on slavery but provide readily available information on some aspects of slavery in Africa. Such works often treat slavery in Africa as part of slavery in the world, the Atlantic world, and Africa. Eltis, et al. 1999 is a database on the Atlantic slave trade; Levtzion and Hopkins 1981, Shillington 2005, and Miller 1993 are types of encyclopedias. Thompson Reuter’s Arts and Humanities Citation Index and UNESCO’s El-Fasi and Hrbek 1988, one volume of an eight-volume history of Africa, are some useful general reference works that give information on slavery in Africa. Miller 1993 and Thioub 2008 give useful bibliographical and historiographical orientations on slavery in the continent.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
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This is a key bibliographical source in which researchers can find valuable information on slavery in Africa. It provides information on important scientific works in many disciplines and subjects. It cites journals with good articles on slavery in Africa and can be a quick means of identifying and accessing such journals online.
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El-Fasi, Muḥammad, and Ivan Hrbek, eds. General History of Africa. Vol. 3, Africa from the Seventh to Eleventh Century. Paris: UNESCO, 1988.
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Volume 3 gives a general survey of the slave trade and slavery in Africa. It provides focus, orientation, and the African perspective on slavery and slave trade in the continent. UNESCO has also published, under its slave route project, more than three hundred titles of bibliographical and documentary sources on slavery; see online.
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Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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This work provides a huge amount of data and useful statistics on the Atlantic slave trade. It shows vividly from the data that the population loss from the trans-Atlantic slave trade was tremendous. However, the database gives information on only the Atlantic situation, therefore telling only part of Africa’s traumatic slavery story. It was updated in 2007 and is also available as an expanded and searchable database online.
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Levtzion, N., and J. E. P. Hopkins, eds. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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This presents the history of West Africa during the great empires of western Sudan and the heydays of Islamic influence, with emphasis on the commercial and political organization in which slavery was preponderant.
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Miller, Joseph C. Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900–1991. Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1993.
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This work provides researchers with quick reference and a type-comparative study of some aspects of slavery in Africa and other parts of the world. It is on slavery worldwide with some items on the practice in Africa. It is continually updated in Slavery & Abolition. A searchable version is available online.
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Shillington, Kevin, ed. Encyclopedia of African History. 3 vols. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
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Though not devoted to slavery in the main, this encyclopedia has good entries by renowned scholars on different aspects of slavery in Africa. Entries on slavery are on different periods and themes such as indigenous slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and other slavery activities that impacted seriously on the continent.
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Thioub, Ibrahima. “African Historiography of Slavery and the Slave Trades: Bringing the Local and Global into Dialogue.” Paper presented at the 122nd American Historical Association Conference, Washington, DC, 3–6 January 2008.
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This paper has been presented at many international colloquiums. It shows how scholars have treated African slavery and emphasizes the Atlantic world, showing strengths and weaknesses of the different trends.
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Journals
A plethora of scholarly journals in the social sciences and the humanities have carried articles on slavery in Africa for many years and continue to do so. Two categories are included in this bibliography: multidisciplinary journals on Africa and African diaspora studies, which usually give space for the study of slavery in Africa, and specialized journals that are devoted to the study of slavery and analogous practices. Both categories have very useful works on the topic and are therefore good sources for researchers on the topic. Journals, like other sources included here, have treated slavery in different languages, and some are bilingual, so researchers of different language backgrounds can easily exploit them. Journals are important in the study of slavery, like other scholarly endeavors, in that young researchers can easily find in them contemporary issues, trends, and paradigms on the subject that are useful for the conceptualization of their works. The journals listed here are introduced in the relevant subsections Multidisciplinary Journals and Specialized Journals.
Multidisciplinary Journals
Many schools and faculties of the social sciences and humanities publish good journals that frequently address issues of slavery in Africa. These include the Journal of African History, Annales de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Paideuma, and the Journal of Economic History. They often carry scholarly articles on different aspects of slavery in Africa, such as slavery among people of given ethnic entities, slavery artifacts, female enslavement and slavery, pawning and slavery, mechanisms of acquiring slaves, treatment and use of slaves, abolition of the overseas slave trade, slavery and Islam in Africa, and slavery and Christianity in Africa. For example, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines and Annales de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines have carried in their bilingual editions articles on slavery in different ethnic entities in Africa. Paideuma publishes in German but often carries articles in English and devotes a lot of space for social studies, especially slavery. The Journal of African History publishes articles on all aspects of African history, but slavery and the impact it has had on the people of the continent are given much space. The Journal of Economic History has published many articles that examine the economic dimensions of slavery in Africa. These journals help us understand slavery in Africa: its ramifications and the effects it has had on the continent, especially on its development.
Annales de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines. 1985–.
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Published by the University of Yaoundé, this journal carries articles on slavery and related practices in Africa quite often.
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Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines. 1960–.
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Since its inception, this journal has often devoted entire editions to the study of slavery (see Vols. 179–180, 2005). It uses historical and anthropological approaches in its articles. In 2010 it published very enriching studies on slavery in the Great Lakes region in East Africa (see Vol. 197) and appears to be very interested in slavery in Africa. Published by Editions de l’EHESS with the assistance of the National Centre of Scientific Research and the National Book Centre.
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Journal of African History. 1960–.
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When the journal was founded, slavery and its abolition were among the themes that preoccupied scholars of African history. Published by Cambridge University Press, this journal has included serious articles in many issues, such as Vol. 11 (1970) on the Niger Delta, Vol. 12 (1971) on pawning, Vol. 29 (1988) on concubinage, and Vol. 37 (1996) on slavery in 20th-century Africa.
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Journal of Economic History. 1940–.
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Published by Cambridge University Press, this journal has offered many editions on slavery. For example, see Peter Emmer’s “The History of the Dutch Slave Trade: A Bibliographical Survey” (Vol. 32, 1972, pp. 728–747).
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Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde. 1938–.
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This journal publishes generally in German, but quite often articles and sometimes entire issues are in English. For example, Vol. 41 (1995) is in English and devoted almost entirely to slavery in Cameroon. Many other issues have carried articles on slavery in Africa, such as Adam Jones’s “From Slaves to Palm Kernels” (Vol. 29, 1983). Published by the Frobenius-Institut at the J. W. Goethe University (Frankfurt am Main).
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Specialized Journals
Journals that specialize on slavery in Africa are few. Nonetheless, Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, Slavery & Abolition, DuBois Review, and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies specialize in publishing works on past and contemporary slavery as a major theme in African studies. The main purpose of Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire is to disseminate slavery scholarship, and therefore some of its articles may not be original works. DuBois Review is highly specialized on African and African American studies but does not appear very regularly. Journal of Transatlantic Studies is perhaps the newest journal devoted to Atlantic history, with slavery as its central theme. Journal of Slavery and Abolition specializes in treating slave trade, slavery, and analogous practices and the ways they have been or are being abolished.
Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire. 1999–.
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This journal is published by Anneaux de la Mémoire, an international alliance of cities, with slavery history as its focus. Africa is one of its areas of focus, especially the port cities. Volumes 2, 4, and 14 included much on Africa.
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DuBois Review. 1985–.
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This journal, which the DuBois Institute in Accra, Ghana, publishes through Cambridge University—albeit irregularly, is quite well focused on issues of slavery in Africa and the American diasporas. It was created to commemorate the pioneering works of Dr. W. E. B. DuBois in the field of Pan-Africanism through the common history of slavery.
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Journal of Transatlantic Studies. 2003–.
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This Routledge journal carries a lot on the African culture, which went across the Atlantic during the time of the slave trade. In Vol. 1, no. 1 (2011), some articles are on the cultural legacy of Atlantic slavery on the Americas and the ramifications of the slave trade in Africa.
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Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies. 1989–.
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This is one of the leading journals published by Routledge. It is devoted to the study of slavery and its abolition and, though not limited to Africa, the journal has published many articles on different aspects of slavery in that continent.
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Primary Sources
Different types of primary sources on slavery in Africa are examined in this section. They include Narrative Works, Translated Works, Archival and Museum Sources, and Oral Collections. They are indeed plentiful, varied, and very important sources in slavery scholarship in Africa because they are the closest representation of the reality of slavery and related practices. In fact, the information they hold represents facts about what took place or is taking place among different peoples of the continent. Regardless of the difficulty of using such works, they remain invaluable sources as far as the study of slavery in preliterary Africa is concerned. In other words, they often contain artifacts that attest to ways the slavery institution was organized among different African peoples.
Narrative Works
There are many eyewitness accounts on slavery in Africa as reported by travelers during the period from the 1470s, when the Atlantic slave trade took deeper roots and the trans-Saharan was blossoming, to the 1840s, when both declined as a result of abolitionist measures. Many such works have been compiled in the form of literary narratives. Recorded narratives of this kind on different parts of the continent were compiled essentially between the 17th and 19th centuries. Some works in this category include Barth 1965 and Claperton and Oudney 1826 on north and central Africa. Equiano 1967 and Park 1960 are travel accounts in West Africa.
Barth, Heinrich. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, Being a Journey of an Expedition Undertaken under the Auspices of HRM’s Government in the Years 1849–1855. London: Frank Cass, 1965.
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Narratives from travelers’ accounts are not limited to slavery practices among the people of Africa, but the reports they give on slavery and that have been so compiled are essential in understanding that slavery in Africa was not the same all over. Barth’s accounts are largely informative, not interpretative.
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Claperton, H., and W. Oudney, eds. Narratives of Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa in the Years 1822, 1823, 1824. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1826.
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Claperton and his team traveled during the period of the abolition of the slave trade and were quite vigilant on the nature of the trade in the lands they passed through. From their narratives, it is known that many enslaved individuals were still being sent across the Sahara during the 1820s.
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Equiano, Olaudah. Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography; The Interesting Narratives of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vasa the African. Edited by Paul Edward. London: Heinemann, 1967.
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These narratives of Equiano’s tremendous slavery experiences in Africa, America, and Europe are enriching. They describe his ordeal when he was enslaved as a boy, sold in Africa, and shipped to America, Europe, and back to Africa. In the narratives, he shares his rich experiences as a slave, slaver, and abolitionist.
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Park, Mungo. Travels of Mungo Park. Edited by R. Miller. London: J. M. Dent, 1960.
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The information from Park’s travels, taken from diaries and records he kept, is important in appreciating slavery in the hinterlands of West Africa. During his first journey at the end of the 18th century, he witnessed a war between Segu and Kaartathat that resulted in the taking and open selling of captives.
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Translated Works
Many scholars have translated useful works on slavery in Africa from Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, German, and local languages into English and French and vice visa. They have thus made available rare sources on slavery to researchers who otherwise could not have exploited them. For example, Kootz-Kretschmer 1932 and Nachtigal 1971–1978 are translations from German to English. De Barro 1898–1903 and Pacheco 1937 are translations of the original from Portuguese to English, and Hansen 2007 is a translation of the original from Danish to English.
de Barro, Joao. Records of South-East Africa. 9 vols. Edited and translated by George M. Theal. London: Government of the Cape Colony, 1898–1903.
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This series of nine volumes is an account of the commercial activities, including the slave trade, in southeastern Africa. De Barro was a great Portuguese historian. The work includes narrative histories of the region, with an emphasis on the collaboration between indigenes and European merchants in the subregion.
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Hansen, Thorkild. Ships of Slaves (Slavernes Skibe).Translated by Kari Dako. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007.
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Dako has translated only the second of the three volumes of Hansen’s work on ships of slaves. The book itself is focused on the ways the Danish/Norwegians participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how they carried out the trade from West Africa to the Americas. First published in 2003.
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Kootz-Kretschmer, E. Stories of Old Times. Edited and translated by M. A. Bryan. London: Sheldon, 1932.
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Bryan edited and translated the works of E. Kootz-Kretschmer, from German into English: Slavery in Eastern and Southern Africa and also Ways I Have Trodden (London: Sheldon, 1936), which is the narrative of Mwashitete, a village chief in the interior of East Africa. The works are pure oral narratives.
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Nachtigal, G. Sahara and Sudan. 4 vols. Translated by A. G. Fisher and H. J. Fisher. London: Hurst, 1971–1978.
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The four volumes of Nachtigal’s works in German deal with subjects other than slavery. These translated volumes with a new introduction and some notes are on the trans-Saharan slave trade and focus largely on the trade in Chad, Darfur, and Sudan.
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Pacheco, Pereira D. Esmeraldo de situ orbis. Translated by G. H. T. Kimble. London: Hakluyt Society, 1975.
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Kimble translated the work from Portuguese into English. In his translation, emphasis is put on early European slavery activities in West Africa where Pacheco bought and sold slaves; hence, some rare hint is given on slave prices in this region during the period. First published in 1937.
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Archival and Museum Sources
Primary sources on slavery in Africa are plentiful in the archives and museums of all European nations that participated actively in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many independent countries in Africa also have archives and museums on slavery. The key European countries include Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and Netherlands. These ex-colonial powers were by the partition accord of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 expected to abolish slave trade in the territories they had acquired and those they were still to acquire in Africa. Such ex-colonial countries have some of the bulkiest archival documents on the abolition of African slave trade and slavery.
British Archives, Manuscripts, and Museums
Many archives and museums in Great Britain have invaluable records and manuscripts on slavery in Africa, especially the trade component of it. The British National Archives hold the important archival Records of the Admiralty, which the navy kept during the abolition era. Also invaluable are manuscripts on the trade and abolition often referred to in many works as “papers.” They can be found in the London and other UK libraries. Among important titled papers are the Parliamentary Papers and the House of Commons and House of Lords Sessional Papers edited by Sheila Lambert (Lambert 1975) and William Torrington (Torrington 1974), respectively. Museums contain material evidence of this traumatic history, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool is one of the richest and most relevant in the United Kingdom.
History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
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This website, sponsored by the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, provides information on the slave trade. The museum also holds material remains on slavery as well as useful artifacts on past slavery in Africa, such as some of the tools that captains and crews used to subdue enslaved Africans in the middle passage.
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Lambert, Sheila, ed. House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century. Vols. 67–73. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975.
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The debates that took place in the House of Commons as shown in this publication were intended to regulate the slave trade. There were not many voices condemning the practice outright.
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Parliamentary Papers.
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Published debates on the Atlantic slave trade and other issues debated in the British Parliament between 1780 and 1840. The debates show the extent to which some British lawmakers were conscious of the evil of the slave trade during this period and how their efforts brought about abolition and eventually ended the inhuman trade in Africa.
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Records of the Admiralty, Naval Forces, Royal Marines, Coastguard, and Related Bodies. London: National Archives.
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The British Admiralty Records on slavery in Africa largely concern the abolition phase of the slave trade from Africa across the Atlantic. They account for ships captured, the number of enslaved persons rescued, and sometimes the names of such individuals and the ship captains and crews involved.
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Torrington, William F., ed. House of Lords Sessional Papers, Dobbs Ferry. Vols. 2–3, Sessions 1798–1799. New York: Oceana, 1974.
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These papers record the lively debates that took place in the House of Lords on the slave trade. They also record the evidence that captains of slave ships summoned before the House presented concerning the conditions onboard such ships; one of the captains, Robert Norris, testified dishonestly in 1788 that conditions were good.
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Archives and Museums in Other European Countries
France, the Netherlands, and Portugal have national archives that house relevant sources on slavery in Africa, especially in their former colonies. The materials in these archives date between the 18th and 20th centuries. The main French archives with relevant sources on slavery in Africa are at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, where one can find a concentration of sources on the history of the French overseas slave trade. Similarly, relevant archives in the Netherlands and Portugal are the National Archives of the Netherlands and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, respectively.
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino. Tropical Research Institute, Lisbon, Portugal.
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The Tropical Research Institute in Lisbon is the main Portuguese depository where African historical records can easily be found, particularly on the period after the 17th century. Though the Portuguese were the first European Atlantic slave traders, records on earlier periods are quite scarce, owing to natural disasters that have affected Portuguese archives.
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Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer. Aix-en-Provence, France.
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Nantes was the greatest French slave-trading port. Its archives house rich slave trade documents on West Africa and the Americas. Records here show, among other evidence, that Nantes merchants did business with Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra and procured thousands of slaves from other parts of West Africa.
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National Archives of the Netherlands. The Hague.
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Archives at The Hague house useful sources on African history with the Dutch at the center. Unfortunately, there are few surviving documents dated before 1716. After this date, regular yearly records throughout the century, with as many as eight volumes of such records for some individual years, are available.
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Archives and Museums in Some African Countries
Archival and museum sources on slavery are found in public and private establishments in many African countries; all cannot be treated here. In Sudan and North Africa, such sources are in Arabic, English, and French; in East Africa, in English and Swahili; and in central and southern Africa, in Portuguese and English. While archives of most African countries were created by former European colonial rulers, many museums have only recently been created. This bibliography focuses more on specialized museums as well as one specialized archive in Nigeria. The archives at Timbuktu include many documents on slavery, especially on the Atlantic and Muslim slave trade and the struggles of the British to stamp out indigenous slavery practices in northern Nigeria. Other relevant museums are those in Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, Angola, Nigeria, and Zanzibar where the Cape Coast Castle Museum, Historical Museum of Abomey, Musée de la Civilization, Slavery National Museum, Calabar Museum, and Stone Town Slave Museum, respectively, hold huge quantities of rich slavery artifacts. These are only a few of the numerous museums in Africa that contain slavery artifacts. Many palace museums have slavery artifacts, among many other historical objects. In Nigeria, such museums and archives are many, but only the Timbuctu Collection in Timbuktu and the Calabar Museum are included here. Many other museums not mentioned also contain valuable material sources on slavery. Most of them are either regional or national. Paradoxically, museums that are representative of the continent are located in colonial capital cities such as London, Berlin, and Paris.
Calabar Museum. Calabar, Nigeria.
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This is one of the newest public museums in Nigeria and is devoted largely to slavery’s material history. It contains artifacts such as weapons, fitters, remains of canoes used to transport slaves, paintings illustrating slaving activities, and many other material remains of this traumatic history in the Bight of Biafra.
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Cape Coast Castle Museum. Cape Coast, Ghana.
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This is a former European Atlantic trade castle, arguably the most complex in Africa and the richest in terms of slavery artifacts. It is well organized for the purposes of pilgrimage, tourism, and research and displays vividly in terms of artifacts the inhumanity that characterized the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
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Goree Museum. Goree Island, Senegal.
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This is Senegal’s greatest storehouse of slave trade and slavery material remains of all sorts. Its location and organization have made it a great center of pilgrimage, tourism, and research.
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Historical Museum of Abomey. Abomey, Benin.
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This museum is built on one of the ancient palaces of the kings of Dahomey. It exploits slavery and other artifacts from these ancient palaces. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and depicts eloquently by its artifacts how slavery was deeply entrenched in the ancient Dahomey Empire.
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Musée de la Civilization. Dschang, Cameroon.
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This is a newly created museum by the Anneaux de la Mémoire near Bamenjinda Palace. It collects and preserves rich slavery artifacts of the Cameroon grassfields where slavery was rife. The Anneaux is also interested in developing a Bangoua Palace Museum, a site where many slavery artifacts also found in Cameroon may be housed.
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Slavery National Museum. Luanda, Angola.
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This is a national slavery museum in the Angolan capital, situated in the Samba district. This port was the principal exit for slaves from central Africa to Brazil. The museum was reopened in 2007 after the civil war caused its closure. It attracts, especially, many pilgrimages by people of African descent from Brazil.
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Stone Town Slave Museum. Stone Town, Zanzibar.
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This is one of the museums in the Stone Town Fort in Zanzibar and specializes in slavery artifacts of all sorts that Arab and African slavers used in raiding for slaves in the East African interior. It houses Arab, Asian, and European slavery artifacts used in the Indian Ocean trade.
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Timbuctu Collection. Ahmed Baba Institute. Timbuktu, Nigeria.
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This is an example of a specialized archive on slavery history in Nigeria. It was established in 1973 and holds over twenty thousand items of largely local chronicles and many single-page legal documents on slavery as it was practiced in Muslim northern Nigeria.
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Missionary Archives
Archives of religious bodies that were established in Africa at the onset of the abolition of trans-Atlantic slave trade and indigenous slavery are useful repositories for information on slavery. Baptist, Protestant, and Catholic mission archives are located in their headquarters and other towns in Europe and Africa, and hold huge amounts of information on slavery and related practices. The Berlin Mission Society, London Missionary Society, Congregational Church World Mission, and White Fathers, for example, maintain rich archives. Some of these bodies have archival documents at the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in both published and unpublished forms. Streit and Dindinger 1916 and Filesi and Vallapardiena 1978 are compilations from missionary records and works on missionary activities in Africa. They emphasize social life in Africa as missionaries saw it. What is important to note is that missionaries were sometimes quite actively involved in the fight against internal slavery in Africa to the extent that they kept runaway slaves in many mission stations. Some were even accused of buying and selling slaves.
Filesi, Teobaldo, and Isidoro de Vallapardiena. La “Missio Antiqua” dei Cappuccini nel Congo (1645–1835): Studio preliminare e guida delle fonti. Rome: Istituto storico cappuccini, 1978.
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This is a huge compilation of published and unpublished documents that Capuchin missionaries kept on life in the Congo from 1645 to 1835. The documents treat many aspects of social life, including slavery practices the Belgians perpetrated during their harsh rule in Congo when they enslaved and exploited Congolese.
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Brásio, António, ed. Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Lisbon, Portugal: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1952–.
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This is a compilation of Jesuits’ and Capuchins’ works in Guinea, Congo, and Angola. It is published in a series, and the first series is still largely in Portuguese. It provides invaluable information on life in these areas during the period of the slave trade in West Africa to 1650 and Central Africa to 1700.
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Streit, Robert, and Johannes Dindinger, eds. Biblioteca Missionum. 33 vols. Münster, Germany: Aachem, 1916.
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This work is a bibliography of published and unpublished manuscripts of missionary writings. The series is quite voluminous, treats different issues, and is not easy to exploit but can be very fulfilling when patiently explored for slavery practices in Africa.
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Oral Collections
Many scholars who have written on slavery in Africa have used oral information collected directly from informants or from transcribed and preserved oral traditions of slaving societies. Unfortunately, the bulk of this information is not well preserved in known public depositories. Nonetheless, there exist good collections of well-documented oral traditions on the topic in the archives of a few public institutions in and outside the continent. Works that exploit such sources include, among others, Alagoa 1986, on the rich traditions of Niger Delta slavers, and Hartwig and Thomas’ unpublished oral collections; Klein 1989 and Miller 1980 are more useful as methodology guides on the use of oral sources in slavery studies.
Alagoa, Ebieberi Joe. “The Slave Trade in Niger Delta Oral Tradition and History.” In Africans in Bondage: Slavery and the Slave Trade: Essays in Honor of Philip Curtin on the Occasion of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of African Studies Program. Edited by Paul Lovejoy, 127–136. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1986.
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This article is helpful for reconstructing slavery history in the Niger Delta. The Delta was a major region in the Atlantic trade. Its various societies have handed down invaluable oral accounts of their involvement in the transactions, which the article highlights well.
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Hartwig, W. Gerald, and Tlou Thomas, eds. Unpublished oral collections. Thomas Tlou Center, Africa Studies Association, Center for Oral Data, Indiana University, Bloomington.
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The two scholars documented oral information on slavery among peoples in eastern and southern Africa. The data may also be found in libraries at Botswana, Dar es Salaam, and Duke Universities.
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Klein, Martin A. “Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget Oral History and the Experience of Slavery in Africa.” History in Africa 16 (1989): 209–217.
DOI: 10.2307/3171785Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work is more a methodology guide on the use of oral accounts for slavery scholarship. It addresses people who did not want to talk openly on this traumatic history through which slavers humiliated and exploited them for export slave trade, as memories of such ill-treatment were too bitter to recall often.
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Miller, Joseph C., ed. The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Folkston, UK: Dawson, 1980.
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This collection of essays on the African past shows how oral information can be exploited for both facts and interpretations of past events, including slavery and its ramifications. The editor is a renowned scholar on slavery who has made extensive use of oral information in writing many slavery history works.
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Regional Studies
The enslaved Africans who were taken out of the continent in different directions crossed three main, terrifying middle passages. They went through the Sahara Desert to the Mediterranean world, the Red Sea/Indian Ocean to Arabia and Asia, and the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. “Trans-slave trade” is used interchangeably with “external slave trade.” The trans-trade is used in this bibliography to emphasize the horror of the middle passage and the connection it had with the relay system that brought enslaved persons from the African interior to the coast where most foreign traders bought slaves. The process is known to have introduced internal slavery in many African societies or given it greater impetus where it existed before. Many scholars have studied slavery largely from a regional approach. They have in this way captured the tremendous regional peculiarities of this terrible history. This bibliography examines some works of this nature, especially on West Africa, West Central Africa, East Africa, North Africa, and Southern Africa. Though linkage of external with internal slavery practices in the continent is rarely the concern of authors, it is obvious in many cases that sources on the former can help in studying the latter.
West Africa
Scholars have done a lot of work on the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa. The trade started in West Africa around the mid-15th century, went on for some four hundred years, and was quite profound in terms of the coverage of the subregion. Thus, the region is subdivided here into subunits, such as Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, and the Bights of Benin and Biafra. Within these multiple subregions, West Africa was arguably one of the most affected regions in the continent.
Senegambia
This was the first subregion of West Africa to experience external slave trade because of its proximity to Western Europe. The Senegal and Gambia Rivers from which the subregion received its name facilitated European exploration and exploitation of the area for early slave trade. Curtin 1975, Barry 1998, Donelha 1977, Crones 1937, Gailey 1965, and Barbot 1992 pay special attention to this area in the study of slavery in Africa. They show how the Portuguese and later other European slavers subjected this region to intense slave trade, which in turn promoted various forms of slavery practices characteristic of the area.
Barbot, Jean. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712. Edited by P. E. H. Hair. London: Hakluyt Society, 1992.
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Barbot’s accounts are not eyewitness ones but compilations from other works on West Africa. He describes the French and English trading activities of the late 17th century along the Guinea Coast, especially the anchoring of ships and the use of canoes to transport slaves and other goods to ships at the coast.
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Barry, Boubacar. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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This work focuses on the place of the Senegambia subregion in Atlantic commerce. It highlights the main European and African participants in the trade and stresses the roles played by the different European merchants, companies, and their African collaborators.
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Crones, G. R., ed. The Voyages of Cadamosto. London: Hakluyt Society, 1937.
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The work places Cadamosto among the early explorers of West Africa; he described the early commercial activities of Senegambia and hinted at the role the Wolof king played in the trade. The king is portrayed as a slave raider who sold many of his victims and used others for farming and other purposes.
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Curtin, Philip D. Economic Change in Pre-colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.
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Curtin shows Senegambia in this work as a victim of both the trans-Saharan and the trans-Atlantic systems. He discusses the ways this intense exploitation affected the indigenous precolonial economy. The instability created as a result of raiding for slaves and the population lost to the trade affected the economy negatively.
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Donelha, André. An Account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea Cape Verde (1625). Edited by Avelino Texteira da Mota. Translated by Paul E. H. Hair. Lisbon, Portugal: Junta de Investigaçoes Cientificas do Ultrama, 1977.
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This is compiled from Portuguese sources of early researchers of the 17th century who studied the region from Sierra Leone up to Cape Verde. The work depicts intense Portuguese commercial activities in the area during this period.
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Gailey, Harry. The History of the Gambia. New York: Prager, 1965.
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This work treats the history of Gambia and shows how it is tied firmly to that of European exploration and commercial activities in the Senegambia region. The work shows also that the hallmark of European activity was the slave trade.
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The Gold Coast
The Gold Coast subregion coincides with present-day Ghana. The first and main attraction of this region for European merchants was gold, as can be inferred from the name. Indeed, gold mining was a great ancient industry in the interior of this subregion, especially among the Asante people. But from the castles, forts, and other petty trade stations, the subregion was arguably one of the greatest slave business spheres in Africa. It should, however, be noted that the Gold Coast was a collection point of departure for enslaved persons from its interior and other parts of West Africa. Nonetheless, the sources included in this bibliography for this subregion are on the Gold Coast per se. For example, Kea 1982, Perbi 2004, and Wilks 1975 show how politics in the key states of the subregion influenced slave taking, and Haenger 2000 and Reynolds 1974 describe the social and economic changes the slave trade introduced.
Haenger, Peter. Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa. Basel, Switzerland: Schlettwein, 2000.
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This work was first published in German in 1997. It treats the relationship between slaves and masters in the Gold Coast. It describes how Christian missionaries and European colonial administrators emancipated and kept or freed slaves, most victims of the raiding and enslavement in the Gold Coast during this period.
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Kea, Ray. Settlements, Trade and Politics in the 17th-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
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This describes the political situation of the Gold Coast region during the 17th century when ethnic polities in the area were struggling to take advantage of external trade with European merchants along the coast. The struggle resulted in conflicts that facilitated slave taking.
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Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004.
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This work examines the ways different peoples of the Gold Coast participated in the Atlantic slave trade, which influenced the traditional slavery practices and lives of peoples in the subregion greatly. The author shows common trends and divergences in the ways the different ethnic peoples practiced slavery.
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Reynolds, Edward. Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, 1807–1874. London: Longman, 1974.
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The author shows how the adjustment from the slave trade of past centuries to so-called legitimate trade was not easy for the people of this subregion. The decline in the export of enslaved persons gave rise to their use internally for other economic ventures.
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Wilks, Ivor. Asante in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
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Wilks portrays Asante in the 19th century as a predatory state that participated in the Atlantic slave trade very actively, drawing enslaved persons that she sold from raids, wars, and tribute. The power and influence she built soon caused serious conflict with the British colonial abolitionists.
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The Slave Coast
The coast of the region where the ancient empire of Dahomey dominated its interior for centuries before it became involved directly in the external slave trade is often called the Slave Coast, not because it supplied more slaves than the other subregions but because enslaved individuals were its principal item in the Atlantic trade. The fact that the most powerful empire was in the interior created a situation whereby the states of the coast came under great pressure from Dahomey, as it wanted direct links to the coastal trade. This subregion’s main exit port was at Whydah, and it required great military might to maintain the route from the capital at Abomey to the port. That militarism and the associated warfare promoted slave business in the subregion. Akinjogbin 1972, Law 1986, and Newbury 1983 highlight the link between militarism and slave taking in this subregion. Bradbury 1973 and Ryder 1977 also focus on the importance of external trade to Benin.
Akinjogbin, I. A. “The Expansion of Oyo and the Rise of Dahomey, 1600–1800.” In A History of West Africa. Vol. 1. Edited by J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, 304–434. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
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The author shows the link between the rise of states in this region and external trade, especially slave trade. The growth of states through conquest, annexation, or usurpation often led to slave taking either as war victims or tribute payment. Such enslaved persons were readily sold.
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Bradbury, R. E. Benin Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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This book is available in many forms and may be found in the Open Library System. It treats many aspects of the interactions of the ancient Benin people and the outside world, especially the trade with Europeans in which slaves featured prominently. First published in 1969.
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Law, Robin. “Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey.” Journal of African History 27 (1986): 237–267.
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700036665Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Law describes the ways Dahomey exploited the slave trade to become a great regional force by examining what scholars have written on the kingdom. The findings are that the history of the Dahomey kingdom is almost integrally linked to the Atlantic slave trade.
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Newbury, Colin W. The Western Slave Coast and Its Rulers. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983.
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This work was first published as an article in the Journal of African History 3.3 (1962). It discusses the evolution of rulership in this region and shows how the English, French, and Germans became de facto rulers of the region owing to their grip on trade.
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Ryder, A. F. C. Benin and the Europeans. Ibadan History Series. New York: Humanities Press, 1977.
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Ryder discusses the many and varied ways in which the Benin people interacted with the Europeans at different stages of their history. Though the book is not devoted entirely to the slave trade, the trade is given reasonable coverage owing to its importance in the history of Benin.
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The Bights of Benin and Biafra
The Bights of Benin and Biafra are combined for this bibliography because of space constraints. It is easy to do so because they lie contiguous and therefore share much in common as far as the external slave trade was concerned. They were generally under the influence of the same slave-trading companies and merchants. Here, the Bights of Benin and Biafra subregion covers the area extending from west of the Niger Delta to Lopez along the Cameroon-Gabon border. It had rich, far-flung hinterlands with some of the most notorious indigenous slave-trading people in West Africa, skilled in canoe paddling, warfare, and the middleman role, which sustained the trade in the region for a very long time. Many works cover the slave trade and internal slavery in this region. Brown and Lovejoy 2011, Afigbo 2003, Noah 1980, Spark 2004, Austen 1995, Law 1997, and Dike 1956 examine many different facets of the slave trade and slavery in the Bights of Biafra and Benin. Some of the works focused more on practices in the Bight of Biafra end up overlapping with or showing connections to the Bight of Benin. In fact, works introduced on the regions listed here usually touch both ends.
Afigbo, A. E. “Britain and the Hydra in the Bight of Biafra: Towards a History of Abolition of Internal Slave Trade in the Oil Rivers and Its Hinterlands, c. 1885–1943.” Journal of African Economic History 31 (2003): 1–18.
DOI: 10.2307/3601944Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The author shows vividly how the struggle to end the internal slave trade and analogous practices that the Atlantic slave trade introduced in the Bight of Biafra was protracted for the British colonial administrators who were anxious to introduce a new trade system.
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Austen, Ralph. “Slavery and Slave Trade on the Atlantic Coast: The Duala of the Littoral.” Paideuma 41 (1995): 127–151.
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This article discusses the roles that middlemen played in the Atlantic slave trade. It portrays the Duala of Cameroon as middlemen who manipulated both the European slave merchants and the Cameroon hinterlands slave dealers to make huge profits for themselves from the business.
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Brown, Carolyn, and Paul Lovejoy, eds. Repercussions of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011.
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The authors in this book give a vivid inside look at indigenous slavery as it was practiced in many polities in the Bight of Biafra, especially those of Igboland. The book provides a long list of relevant sources on slavery in Africa and the diaspora that can be helpful to researchers.
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Dike, K. O. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.
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Dike captures vividly the political and economic situation of the Niger Delta in the second half of the 19th century. He shows how political growth of the Delta states was firmly tied to trading activities, especially the slave and palm oil trade.
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Law, Robin, ed. The English in West Africa, 1681–1689: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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The work is divided into two parts: Part 1 covers 1681–1683, and Part 2 covers 1685–1688. It focuses on the social dimensions of the Atlantic slave trade, especially on pawning as a method of acquiring slaves. It is based on the trade correspondence of Royal African Company transactions along the coast of Africa.
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Noah, Monday Efiong. Old Calabar: The City States and the Europeans, 1880–1885. Uyo, Nigeria: Scholar Press, 1980.
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This work describes the ways the Old Calabar developed complex city-states that treated nationals of different European nations differently as far as the slave trade business was concerned. It shows that the practice often created rivalry and conflicts among the city-states.
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Spark, Randy J. Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Odyssey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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This book recounts the long story of two princes of a slave-trading family in the Calabar area who were carried away in error in 1767 as enslaved persons. The princes, Little Ephraim Robin and Ancona Robin John, were, however, returned and thereafter resumed their role in the slave-trading business.
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West Central Africa
West Central Africa was a major region in the Atlantic slave trade. The Belgians and Portuguese dominated the business here. It is a huge region covering the Congo, Angola, and a very vast interior from which slavers extracted enslaved individuals and sold them to European slave merchants at the coast of Angola. From there, they were taken generally to Latin America and the Caribbean. The business and the slavery it brought about in this area have attracted many scholars. For example, Martin 1972 and MacGaffey 1979 focus more on the ways the indigenous people exploited the trade and their interactions with men of the external trade. Miller 1979 also emphasizes social and economic impacts of slavery and slave trade on the people of Angola. Hodgkin 1997 (cited under General Overviews) touches on many parts of the Atlantic Africa but focuses more on West and West Central Africa.
MacGaffey, Wyatt. “Economic and Social Dimensions of the Kongo Slavery (Zaire).” In Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, 235–260. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
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This book chapter is on the economic and social impact of slavery on the Congo people with a focus on Mbanza Ntala, where many disputes within the Mbanza Ntala clan affected economic and social life and promoted slavery.
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Miller, Joseph C. “Imbangala Lineage Slavery (Angola).” In Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, 205–234. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
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This book chapter shows how Angolan societies that became involved in the external slave trade developed various types of social stratifications with great ramifications. These social statuses, according to the author, did not hinder economic and social mobility.
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Martin, Phyllis. The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576–1870: The Effects of the Changing Commercial Relations of Loango. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
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Loango was among the first regions in Africa to be exploited for slaves and the last to end the trans-Atlantic trade. Martin’s work gives vivid accounts of the external and internal actors who took part in the trade and how the Loango people manipulated foreign slave traders to maximize gains.
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Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is an ambitious work in terms of the period it covers. It shows in outline form the roles Africans in the continent and people of African origin in the diasporas in Americas played in making this history of great trauma.
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East Africa
The impact of the external slave trade on this subregion was great, especially in terms of the forces exerted from different directions. There were three main external areas that drew slaves from the region. Enslaved persons who crossed the Red Sea went generally to Arabia, while a majority who entered the Indian Ocean went to various parts of Asia. Again, a good portion of them formed part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Still, many enslaved individuals were put to work in clove and sugarcane plantations on the East African offshore islands, which both Europeans and Arabs operated. Scholarship on this has also been quite abundant and varied, though only a few works are examined here. Alpers 1975 on East Africa and the Atlantic slave trade, Hartwig 1979 on servitude in Tanzania, Romero 1998 on the Lamu people of Kenya, Cooper 1977 on plantations and slavery, Wright 1993 on women and slavery, and Sheriff 1987 on Zanzibar treat trade and slavery among different peoples of this region and the ways they affected both economic and social life in the region.
Alpers, A. Edward. Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa: Changing Patterns of International Trade to the Later Nineteenth Century. London: Heinemann, 1975.
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This work is on the Atlantic slave trade and the impact it had on East Africa in the late 19th century. Alpers demonstrates, as in his other works, how Europeans and African slavers exploited African societies to obtain the slaves they passed onto the Atlantic traffic.
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Cooper, Frederick. Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.
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This work is a case study of the ways in which plantation entrepreneurs exploit workers in Africa. It shows how the wages they pay and social conditions of the workers in Arab and former European plantations in East Africa, including Zanzibar, can be considered slavelike.
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Hartwig, Gerald W. “Changing Forms of Servitude among the Kebere of Tanzania.” In Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, 261–286. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
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In this book chapter, Hartwig shows how slavery evolved among the Kebere of the lake region of East Africa—from primitive servitude to outright slavery, with many ramifications—when they became involved in external slave and ivory trade in the 19th century.
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Romero, Patricia. “Where Have All the Slaves Gone? Emancipation and Post-Emancipation in Lamu Kenya.” Journal of African History 27 (1998): 497–512.
DOI: 10.1017/S002185370002329XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article shows the impact of emancipation of slaves on the Lamu people of Kenya. Slavery appeared to have been deeply rooted among them, but with the advent of emancipation, it was not easy to tell who was and was not formerly a slave.
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Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices, & Ivory in Zanzibar: integration of an East African commercial empire into the world economy, 1770-1873. London: James Currey, 1987.
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Sheriff shows in this work how three main items—slaves, spices, and ivory—dominated the economy of Zanzibar for over one hundred years and the way in which the slave trade fostered trade in the other two trade items.
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Wright, Marcia. Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories from East/Central Africa. Washington, DC: Lilian Barber, 1993.
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In the life stories that are told in this work, emphasis is on the plight of women in the slave trade and slavery in Africa, especially in 19th-century East/Central Africa. The author explains why the plight of a female was different from that of a male slave in the subregion.
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North Africa
External slavery activities in North Africa were very varied. The key actors were Arabs, with some Europeans and Africans. North Africa slavers drew their victims from largely the Sudan of Africa, and the Arabs monopolized the crossing of enslaved Africans from the Sudan to the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Slave trading appeared to have been quite profitable, and, as a result, Arab traders, missionaries, and scholars were involved at various times and to various degrees in taking enslaved persons to the Mediterranean and Arab worlds. Many scholars have addressed Islam and the slavery in Africa that characterized the North African slave business. This bibliography examines a few such works. Hunwick 1992 and Hunwick and Harrak 2000 treat the impact of enslaved Africans in the Mediterranean world. Klein 1992, McDougall 1985, and Levtzion 1985 discuss Islam and slavery in North Africa.
Hunwick, John O. “Black Africans in the Mediterranean World: Introduction to the Neglected Aspect of African Diaspora.” In The Human Commodity. Edited by Elizabeth Savage, 5–38. London: Frank Cass, 1992.
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The work, though in an introductory form, treats what the author claims is a neglected aspect of African diaspora. The trans-Saharan trade brought many enslaved Africans to the Mediterranean world, but their whereabouts and the cultural impact they and their descendants have had are not well known.
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Hunwick, John O., and Fatima Harrak, eds. Mi’raj al-su’ud: Ahmad Replies on Slavery. Publications de L’Institute des Etudes Africaines, Textes et Documents 7. Rabat, Malta: Universite Mohammed V, 2000.
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Hunwick and Harrak edited and translated these rich sources from Arabic into English and added an introduction and explanatory notes, which help in appreciating the magnitude of the North African slave trade.
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Klein, Martin. “Slave Trade in Western Sudan during the Nineteenth Century.” In The Human Commodity. Edited by Elizabeth Savage, 36–60. London: Frank Cass, 1992.
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Klein shows in this chapter the role that the Western Sudan region played in supplying slaves in both the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan trade in the 19th century. The chapter alludes to the role of Islam in the taking, sale, and use of slaves in the region and the outside world.
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Levtzion, Nehemia. “Slavery and Islamization in Africa.” In Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa. Vol. 1. Edited by John R. Willis, 182–198. London: Frank Cass, 1985.
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The author attempts to link slavery activities in many parts of North Africa to Islam. Though Muslim teachers encouraged enslavement as a means of Islamizing, Islamized Africans were usually not free as such. Nonetheless, slavery and Islam created a forum for profound cultural interactions, especially in North Africa.
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McDougall, E. Ann. “The Views from Audagust, Warriors, Clerics and Merchants in Southern Saharan Society, 8th through 15th Centuries.” Journal of African History 26 (1985): 1–32.
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The article describes the ways in which the slave trade in the ancient empire of Ghana was rooted in warfare and promoted by Islamic clerics and merchants. The victims of these internecine wars went to Muslim North Africa where Arabs, Europeans, and black Africans were absorbed into Islam.
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Southern Africa
This is perhaps the only region of Africa on which the external slave trade did not initially and directly impinge. It was from the eastern coast of southern Africa that the Portuguese, the first European slavers in the region, attempted to exploit slaves for trade. It was later, in 1652, when the Dutch who supplanted the Portuguese in many parts of southern Africa created a settlement in the area of the Cape of Good Hope, that internal slavery was introduced and it became one of the most inhuman types of slavery known in the history of the continent. The slavery the Boers introduced in South Africa was built on racism, which proscribed apartheid as a way of organizing the state. But while keeping the races apart, they enslaved and exploited Africans. Dooling 2008; Eldredge 1994; Mason 2003; Shell 1994; and Zimba, et al. 2004are among the works that show how slavery was deeply rooted in southern Africa and how it became grafted on the apartheid that the Boers introduced in the region.
Dooling, Wayne. Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008.
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This focuses on the slave trade and slavery in the Cape colony during the period from the mid-17th century to the end of the 19th century, and shows the difficulties the British encountered from both slavers and the enslaved in the struggle to abolish the practice.
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Eldredge, Elizabeth. Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier. Edited by Eldredge, Elizabeth and Fred Morton. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.
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The author describes the ways in which the Dutch raided indigenous communities of South Africa for slaves, whom they used and sold. It shows that slave trade and slavery were widespread practices in the region until the end of the 19th century.
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Mason, E. John. Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
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This work treats the social dimensions of slavery in South Africa during the period of Boers domination. It details the tasks slaves performed, their families, and the religion they practiced. This information is from the voices of slaves and slaveholders, as recorded and maintained in British archives on the area.
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Shell, R. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1834. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.
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In this book, like other works on the social dimensions of slavery in the Cape, Shell describes the ways in which a multiracial slave society evolved in the Cape colony of South Africa. The author uses information collected from slave-owning households to illustrate slave–master relations in this society.
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Zimba, B., E. Alpers, and A. Isaacman, eds. Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southern Africa. Maputo, Mozambique: Filsom, 2004.
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This publication is the outcome of a UNESCO-sponsored project on slave routes in southern Africa. The project mapped overland routes slaves passed through, as recreated from oral traditions and available colonial and missionary records. The project commenced in 2001 and resulted in a 2004 conference.
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Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Slow Death of Slavery in Africa
The external slave trade, internal slave dealing, and slavery persisted for a long time in many parts of Africa despite the great efforts that Britain and some other European nations made to abolish them beginning in the 19th century. The struggle was protracted and continued well into the colonial occupation of Africa. Both European slavers and their African collaborators were responsible for the long duration of this struggle, the delay in ending these evil practices. Also, slavery and related practices introduced through the external trade had persisted for a very long time and become deeply rooted before they were tackled. Many sources are available on the struggle to end slavery practices in the continent. They include scientific works and colonial reports. Klein 1982, Klein 1998, Renault 1971, and Silla 1966 focus on the abolition struggle in the Portuguese and French colonies. For the struggle in former British territories, see Afigbo 2003, Lovejoy and Hogendorn 1993, and Smith 1954. The Colonial Intelligence and Assessment Reports on the British Southern Cameroons are relevant primary sources. The assessment reports examine the potential of various ethnic peoples in many ways, including their ability to perpetrate slavery practices. In a like manner, the intelligence reports on the lack of security in the same territory included the circumvention of slavery-abolition measures by ethnic entities. Such reports, which the British administrators passed along to their home government, have much to say on slavery. Indeed, these sources show that the slavery-abolition struggle was protracted and the death of slavery in Africa very slow.
Afigbo, A. E. “Britain and the Hydra in the Bight of Biafra: Towards a History of the Abolition of Internal Slave Trade in the Oil Rivers and its Hinterland, c. 1885–c. 1943.” Journal of Economic History 31 (2003): 1–18.
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This article employs varied sources to show how slaving societies in the Bight of Biafra circumvented abolition measures. It shows how slave dealers of the Oil Rivers who exploited slaves for internal economic purposes were not always prepared to give up the practice.
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Colonial Intelligence and Assessments Reports. National Archives of Cameroon, University of Buea.
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The British colonial administrators wrote intelligence and assessment reports on the various ethnic entities within their colonial territories in Africa. The files coded “Af[year]” and “Ce[year]” have many sections devoted to the abolition of slavery and analogous practices.
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Klein, Martin. Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584138Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Klein shows how the French exploited the slave trade to build colonies and tried to abolish slavery in their colonies when they gave up the trade. He uses copious primary and secondary sources to illustrate the difficulties the French colonial administration experienced in coping with slavery in its African colonies.
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Klein, S. Herbert. “Portuguese Slave Trade from Angola in the Eighteenth Century.” In Forced Migration: The Impact of Export Slave Trade on African Societies. Edited by J. E. Inikori. New York: Africana, 1982.
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The author shows how slavers-cum-colonialists ravaged Africa and how the Portuguese in particular, who colonized Angola beginning in the 16th century and devastated it for over four hundred years, were very reluctant to end the slave trade and unwilling to discourage internal slavery. He draws evidence from Angolan, Brazilian, and Portuguese archival sources.
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Lovejoy, E. Paul, and Jan S. Hogendorn. Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511563065Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The authors describe vividly the slow decline of slavery in northern Nigeria. They claim that, despite the opposition of British colonial administration to slavery, it took over forty years before they could put it down or contain the practice. The fact that slavery continued in different guises has continued to delay complete abolition.
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Renault, François “L’abolition de l’esclavage au Sénégal: L’attitude de l’administration française (1848–1905).” Revue française histoire d’outre-mer 59 (1971): 5–81.
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This article describes the multiple problems the French colonial administration had in trying to suppress slavery in Senegal. It shows that the difficulties were the result of the administration’s ambivalent attitude toward internal slavery.
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Silla, Ousmane “Persistance des castes dans la société wolof contemporaine.” Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamentale d’Afrique Noire, Série B 28 (1966): 731–770.
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This work shows how difficult it has been, since the French occupation, and remains to suppress slavery among the Wolof of Senegambia because the practice is deeply rooted in their castelike social system. It is not easy to differentiate slavery from indigenous forms of servitude.
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Smith, M. G. “Slavery and Emancipation in Two Societies.” Social Economic Studies 3 (1954): 239–290.
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This article on the Hausa and Kanuri societies of Damagaram examines many factors that influenced slavery and emancipation among them. It is a comparative study of the ways these societies recruited and used slaves and the ways they emancipated and integrated enslaved persons into their groups.
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New Forms of Slavery in Africa
Old forms of slavery and slave dealing are still fashionable in some countries like Ethiopia, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sudan. In addition, new types are now practiced in many countries in the continent as well as in other parts of the world. The new types include sex slavery, child trafficking, and undue exploitation of helpless workers by unscrupulous persons and business entrepreneurs. The trafficking of women and children from rural areas to big cities in Africa and from Africa to Europe and Arabia has become a disturbing practice. The women so trafficked are exploited even by some other women as sex slaves, while younger children are employed to do all types of domestic chores. Many specialized publications—books, articles, and reports—exist on these practices in Africa. Bales 1999, Konings 1995, and Gould 2008treat modern forms of economic exploitation. Quirk 2008 and Zheng 2010 examine different methods that slavers used to induce young people into exploitative sex slavery in Africa and other parts of the world.
Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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This work is a survey of human trafficking that gives a comparative picture of the situation in different parts of the world. For example, Mauritania, with some 250,000 to 300,000 enslaved individuals today, is ranked among countries with the largest number of people still living in slavery.
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Gould, Chandré. Selling Sex in Cape Town: Sex Work and Human Trafficking in a South African City. Pretoria, South Africa: Institute of Security Studies, 2008.
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The work discusses how businessmen and women force girls into prostitution to make money for them in Cape Town. It claims that such girls are usually recruited and trafficked for jobs in the city, but end up becoming prostitutes despite all the risks this carries.
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Konings, Piet. Gender and Class in the Tea Estates of Cameroon. Leiden, The Netherlands: African Studies Center, 1995.
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This is a study of enterprises that exploit helpless female workers in a slavelike manner. Female workers dominate the workforce of the Tole and Ndu tea estates in Cameroon but have been helplessly exploited since the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC) created Tole in 1954.
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Quirk, Joel. Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery. Paris: UNESCO, 2008.
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This is survey of contemporary slavery practices worldwide. It also provides a list of sources including conventions, reports, articles, books, and websites on slavery practices with many countries in Africa featured prominently. It shows that new forms of slavery, like the old, are a significant problem in Africa.
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Zheng, Tiantian. Sex Trafficking, Human Rights and Social Justice. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010.
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This study reveals the vivid life experiences of victims of sex exploitation and the agencies involved in trafficking women in Africa. It discusses the extent to which the human rights of victims are abused and shows clearly that new forms of slavery are rampant in Africa despite efforts made to combat them.
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UNESCO Sources
In addition to the UNESCO series on African history (see El-Fasi and Hrbek 1988, cited under Reference Works), which devotes much space to slavery, UNESCO offers specialized websites for the quick dissemination of information on topical issues including slavery. Because the scourge of slavery continues to bedevil humankind, many scholars have continued to research the various aspects of new forms of slavery, such as forced labor (Forced Labour Convention), child labor (Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 1999), sex slavery (Integrated Regional Information Networks 2004), and other forms of human abuse. Such works are disseminated quickly through websites so that the hidden activities of slavers can be tracked and the responsible parties condemned and punished. Information on forced labor, child labor, and other new forms of slavery as well as new facts and interpretations on old forms can be obtained from the websites listed here. UNESCO also sponsors projects on slave routes in many countries in Africa (see the Slave Route). Such projects’ purpose is mapping out and writing the history of routes through which enslaved persons were taken to coastal exit ports. From oral and other sources, information about the routes is collected and published under the auspices of UNESC in reports, books, and/or documentaries.
Forced Labour Convention (No. 29). Geneva, Switzerland: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1930.
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At the general OHCHR site, one can find information on slavery emanating from forced labor of all kinds. Also provided are United Nations documents on instruments and monitoring bodies since 1948 and other relevant publications on forced labor in Africa and the rest of the world.
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Integrated Regional Information Networks. Ghana-Gambia: Sex Slave Children Trafficked by Ghanaian Fishermen. Nairobi, Kenya: Integrated Regional Information Networks, 2004.
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A very useful IRIN report on child trafficking. The report shows that a flourishing sex-slave business network exists in Gambia that draws victims, usually girls, from neighboring countries, especially Ghana. Ghanaian fishermen traffic them to the Gambia, where the criminal sex-slave industry appears to be rife.
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The Slave Route.
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This website provides information on many of the slave route projects that UNESCO sponsors in Africa. The projects in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mozambique are some of the best developed. Slave routes in Africa help promote awareness of the activities of past and present slavers and interest in this history of shame.
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Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, (No.182). Geneva, Switzerland: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1999.
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At the general OHCHR site, one may find child labor convention documents on the worst forms of exploitation worldwide. Information on children performing exploitative assignments in mines, on farms, and in militia groups in Africa can also be obtained easily.
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Creative Works on Slavery and Slave Trade
It is also possible to find useful sources on slavery in Africa in the works of creative writers. Many have captured this painful history well and presented it vividly and graphically in poetry and prose. With or without concrete facts, they have evoked the evil aspects of the slave trade in general and the trans-slave trade and associated slavery in Africa. This type of literature is important in pricking the consciences of people against the perpetration of such inhumanity as a gainful business venture, especially as the practice shows its ugly head in the new forms of human trafficking today in many countries in Africa. Armah 1995 and Opoku-Agyemang 1997 are examples of this in poetry form, while Ojo-Ade 2007 is in prose.
Armah, Ayi Kwei. Osiris Rising: A Novel of African Past, Present and Future. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh, 1995.
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The author revisits the history of enslavement, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the diaspora from a purely creative perspective. The work evokes the memories of an African past, particularly the way slavery has continued to pervade the relationship between Africans and African Americans anxious to trace their ancestral roots.
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Ojo-Ade, Femi. Dreamers: Short Stories. Lagos, Nigeria: Amoge, 2007.
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The author paints a picture of the hopes and disappointments of many young people who are lured easily into sex slavery as employment abroad. He hints at how many sex slaves also run the risk of contracting terrible diseases such as HIV-AIDS.
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Opoku-Agyemang, Kwando. Seoul Eyes. Seoul: Asiatic Research Center, Korea University, 1997.
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In beautiful poetry, the author uses the metaphors of “cold comfort” and “Afro Blue” to depict the sex slavery that the Japanese inflicted on Korean women during World War II and that Africans suffered via Europeans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, thus evoking the plight of women in the trade.
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Impact of Slave Trade and Slavery on Africa
As shown in this bibliography, African slavery history has had lasting impacts that are better appreciated from a thematic approach. The relevant themes employed here for this purpose include the Muslim trade and religion, which gave slavery in Africa a unique character in Muslim areas; European capitalism and colonialism, which exploited slavery practices profitably; and indigenous slave dealing and slavery, which changed economic, political, and social life in many parts of the continent. The literature on these themes is abundant and treats the profound impacts they have had on the continent in different areas. It is also important to understand that it was the way in which various slaving polities in Africa adapted slavery to their needs that made it difficult for them to give it up.
Muslim Trade, Religion, and Slavery in Africa
The spread of Islam to Africa south of the Sahara, especially Sudan Africa, was always accompanied by trade. Both trade and religion impacted slavery tremendously. In fact, many Muslim missionaries were often traders. Islamic teaching on slavery is more concerned with the treatment of slaves by masters than the enslavement and sale of non-Muslims. Thus, Muslim scholars, missionaries, and traders were often involved without qualms in the slave trade. Muslim traders who ferried a huge amount of goods across the Sahara used African porters, whom they had acquired through purchase. At the end of the journey, they used them as slaves or resold them to other slave users. From the 15th to the 20th centuries, when the practice apparently ended, slaves were not just porters but a major commodity of the trans-Saharan trade; as a consequence, Islam impacted many people of Africa through the slave trade. Fisher and Fisher 1999 and Lavers 1994 show the ways trade between Muslim North Africa and the Sudan encouraged slavery in the continent, while Naniya 1994 and Kimba 1994 (cited under European Capitalism, Imperialism, and Slavery in Africa) are more concerned with direct Islamic influence on indigenous slavery and show how slaves who went through the trans-Saharan system were procured and the impact Muslim-influenced slavery had on the societies thus affected.
Fisher, Allan G. B., and Humphrey J. Fisher. Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa: The Institution in Saharan and Sudanic Africa and the Trans-Saharan Trade. London: Hurst, 1999.
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This work surveys slavery in Africa and shows how the spread of Islam across the Sahara Desert promoted the slave trade, though Islam did not introduce slavery in the continent. The authors demonstrate clearly that Islam gave the trans-Saharan slave trade a wide dimension and the slavery it engendered a great magnitude.
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Lavers, John E. “Trans-Saharan Trade before 1800: Towards Quantification.” Paideuma 40 (1994): 243–278.
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The author brings together the scarce and fragmented data on the trade between the kingdoms of Sudan Africa, particularly Hausa states and those of North Africa, especially the Sultanate of Tripoli. He shows how trade and the diplomatic exchange of gifts between these rulers involved slaves and influenced both politics and economies.
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Naniya, Tijjani Muhammad. “The Impact of the British Conquest on the Interpretation and Application of the Shari’a.” Paideuma 40 (1994): 163–172.
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Naniya stresses in the article the fact that the long Islamic presence did not change completely the traditional cultures in Hausa land until 1804 when the Shari’a came into force through jihad. Thereafter, the Shari’a governed both spiritual and temporal affairs, including slavery practices in most states in the area.
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Indigenous Slave Dealing and Slavery in Africa
“Indigenous slave dealing” in Africa is a term used to differentiate between the external slave trade and internal slavery practices, which in some societies were the result of the external slave trade. Formerly, scholars just dismissed slave dealing in Africa as part of the external slave trade. In recent years it has attracted the attention of many scholars as a field of research on its own because of the ways it impacted slaving communities. Perbi 2004; Chem-Langhëë, et al. 1995; Meillassoux 1991; Fomin and Ngoh 1998; Fomin 2002 (cited under General Overviews); and Miers and Kopytoff 1977 are focused on the impact of internal slave dealing on the continent.
Chem-Langhëë, Bongfen, Ian Fowler, and David Zeitlyn, eds. Slavery and Slave-Dealing in Cameroon in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1995.
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Cameroon belongs to the Bight of Biafra region in African slavery history and though active in both the trans-slave trade and internal slave dealing, it had not received commensurate attention until this edited collection was published. Its contributors treat slavery practices in many ethnic entities.
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Fomin, E. S. D., and Victor J. Ngoh. Slave Settlements in the Banyang Country, 1850–1950. Buea, Cameroon: University of Buea, 1998.
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The book explains why the Banyang, one of the slaving peoples of Cameroon, could not integrate slaves they acquired and kept as a result of their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, so they created separate settlements for them. Slaves could not fit into their egalitarian, noncentralized corporate organization.
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Meillassoux, Claude. The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
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The author describes the ways in which African slavery was different from European capitalist-oriented slavery. He claims that the exclusive relationship between African slaves and masters was the outcome of the social impact of slavery on those people. First published as Anthropologie de l’esclavage: Le ventre de fer et d’argent (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986).
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Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
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Many contributors to this work survey the impact slavery had on the people they studied. They paint clear pictures of the effects of slavery on the lives of people, especially in terms of political and social organization.
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Perbi, Akosoa Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004.
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Though limited to Ghana, this text is useful for those interested in the ways slavery was organized in traditional African societies. It is worth noting that the Gold Coast (Ghana) remains a key area where the trans-Atlantic and internal slavery practices, which the author treats exhaustively, were rife for many centuries.
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European Capitalism, Imperialism, and Slavery in Africa
The linkage of slavery and analogous practices in many parts of Africa to the European capitalism of the Age of Sail is not a difficult concept to establish. It presupposes that the European incessant quest for slave labor from Africa to feed labor-intense capitalist ventures in the Americas impacted seriously on Africa in many ways. It was at the very origin of slavery among many people of Africa: It gave slavery greater momentum where it already existed and raised a group of African capitalist slavers who had not existed before. The European colonization of Africa is also seen as a major factor of the external slave trade, which weakened the continent so badly that it was unable to resist European colonization as people did elsewhere in the world. Therefore, European colonization was more profound, total, and destructive in Africa than perhaps anywhere in the world. Works that examine the impact of slavery on Africa from this perspective include Rediker 2007, which captures the inhumanity often associated with the capitalism of the Atlantic slave trade from the perspective of life onboard the slave ship. Manning 1990, Kimba 1994, and Lovejoy 2000 show various ways in which slavery directly built European capitalism and/or prepared the continent for European imperialism.
Kimba, Idrissa. “Les révoltes paysannes et anticoloniales dans l’ouest du Niger, 1905–1906.” Paideuma 40 (1994): 173–213.
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This attributes the effectiveness of the generalized anticolonial peasants’ revolt in west Niger and neighboring regions as resistance against imperialism, which many diverse ethnic entities of the subregion organized. The peasants revolted against French colonialists who wanted to saddle them with a new form of slavery.
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Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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The author discusses slavery’s impact on Africa in the varied forms he terms “transformations.” He has ventured into almost all aspects of the institution in Africa, but his main area of research is the hinterlands of the Bight of Biafra, where the impact of European slavery practices was tremendous. First published in 1983.
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Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Manning, in a cursory but all-embracing manner, shows the ways in which slavery impacted the lives of people in Africa and the extent to which the slave trade in Africa spread. He uses ships’ records and port statistics to support claims on the numbers of slaves exported from Africa.
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Rediker, Marcus B. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.
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The author beautifully but emotionally narrates the horror of the Atlantic slave ship. He shows from a historical perspective the terror of the captives, the evolution of the slave ship, the middle passage, and the lives of both slaves and sailors. This book will interest researchers working on the social dimensions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
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