Title: Trade between Europe and Africa | Revealing Histories
Headings: Trade between Europe and Africa
Africa, the arrival of Europeans and the transatlantic slave trade
Trade between Europe and Africa
by Dr Emma Poulter

Content: 'My aunt, Mr Sowood's youngest daughter, told me that some of his 'boys' brought it to him at the quay-side when he was leaving for England. It was all boxed up and he did not know what was in it until he got home. He recognised it as having come from a ju-ju house and would not have accepted it if he had known, as it was an object of worship.' The transatlantic slave trade, however, was not only reliant on Europeans. The trading systems required to enable slavery also depended on African middlemen who formed an intricate network throughout western Africa, supplying captured Africans from inland and arranging the caravans via which they were marched, shackled, to the coast where they were traded. Kingdoms such as Kumasi (former Ashanti capital) in present day Ghana and Dahomey and Benin in Nigeria grew large and prosperous from the money they made from trading enslaved Africans to Europeans. The only contact with Africa that European slave traders had during this period, was therefore conducted along the west African beaches. The basis of the relationship between Europeans and coastal Africans was purely one of commercial interest. In order to legitimate the large-scale sale of humans as commodities over a period of 300 years, any understanding of the cultures from which these enslaved Africans belonged were nullified in order to promote the idea of African peoples as ‘primitives'. As the historian James Walvin points out: